SPAM: Re: [TAG] Re: Gentoo Installation

[John Karns]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Jimmy O'Regan so eloquently said:

> John Karns wrote:

>> ... and Linux has ncp, which allows us to mount netware volumes.  I had 
>> ocassion to use it once while converting a Netware 3.10 server to marsnwe / 
>> Linux.  It worked beautifully.  Ahh, but it was stated "a few things which 
>> _weren't_ included in Linux" (emphasis added), so depending on your 
>> time-frame, BSD could could have been there first.  All the same, ncp 
>> support has been in Linux for about as long as _I_ can remember.

> No no, the BSDs also have NCP support. NWFS is Netware's disk filesystem. A 
> company started a while back called Timponagas (sp?) which  was founded by a 
> former Netware guy, who wrote code for Linux to read these disks. The BSD 
> code came later, and most likely used the Linux code as a reference. But it 
> wasn't included in the kernel; it was only available as a patch.

It doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me, in that AFAIK, NCP is 
Netware Core Protocol, which I have always thought to be restricted to the 
internal protocol used by the Netware DOS redirector to talk to a Novell 
server; i.e., ipx/spx.  I didn't think it had anything to do with the 
filesystem.  But the comments included with the Linux kernel configuration 
help text seem to cloud the issue a little bit, saying:

NCP file system support (to mount NetWare volumes) 
CONFIG_NCP_FS
   NCP (NetWare Core Protocol) is a protocol that runs over IPX and is
   used by Novell NetWare clients to talk to file servers.  It is to
   IPX what NFS is to TCP/IP, if that helps.  Saying Y here allows you
   to mount NetWare file server volumes and to access them just like
   any other Unix directory.

So they call it ncpfs as opposed to nwfs.  I would tend to think that 
Linux NCP support would apply more to including ipx & spx support in the 
kernel.

-- 
John Karns